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"Lady Chatterley's Lover" was the subject of one of the most infamous trials of the 20th Century when Penguin were prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. However, with expert witnesses for the defence including E.M. Forster, Penguin were acquitted and permitted to publish in 1960. The book became a best-seller largely on account of its explicit scenes of a sexual nature and use of four letter words. However, re-reading again over forty years later, one realises that although the sex scenes are still graphic even today, the book is about much more than sex. It covers love, class, disability, family relationships, infertility, politics and is read by acclaimed actress Emilia Fox, star of "Silent Witness".

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Perhaps the most famous of Lawrence's novels, the 1928 Lady Chatterley's Lover is no longer distinguished for the once-shockingly explicit treatment of its subject matter--the adulterous affair between a sexually unfulfilled upper-class married woman and the game keeper who works for the estate owned by her wheelchaired husband. Now that we're used to reading about sex, and seeing it in the movies, it's apparent that the novel is memorable for better reasons: namely, that Lawrence was a masterful and lyrical writer, whose story takes us bodily into the world of its characters.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.

Review

Novel by D.H. Lawrence, published in a limited English-language edition in Florence (1928) and in Paris (1929). It was first published in England in an expurgated version in 1932. The full text was only published in 1959 in New York City and in 1960 in London, when it was the subject of a landmark obscenity trial (Regina v. Penguin Books Limited) that turned largely on the justification of the use in the novel of until-then taboo sexual terms. This last of Lawrence's novels reflects the author's belief that men and women must overcome the deadening restrictions of industrialized society and follow their natural instincts to passionate love. Constance (Connie) Chatterley is married to Sir Clifford, a wealthy landowner who is paralyzed from the waist down and is absorbed in his books and his estate, Wragby. After a disappointing affair, Connie turns to the estate's gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors, a symbol of natural man who awakens her passions. -- The Merriam-Webster Encyclopedia of Literature

A book which has achieved more notoriety for its sex scenes (shocking in 1930, when the book was written) than for its character studies, Lady Chatterley's Lover focuses on the affair between Constance, the "sturdy" young wife of Clifford Chatterley, and the gamekeeper of the Chatterleys' estate in the remote midlands. Constance, who married Clifford a month before he left for World War I, has become his caretaker since his return from the war, paralyzed from the waist down and impotent. A writer who surrounds himself with intellectual friends, Clifford regards Connie as his hostess and caregiver and does not understand her abject yearning for some life of her own.

The distance between Constance and Clifford increases when Mrs. Bolton, a widow from the village, becomes his devoted caretaker, and he becomes increasingly dependent upon her. In a remarkable scene, Clifford finally tells Connie that he'd like an heir, and he does not care whom she finds to be the father of "his" child. He believes, in fact, that he could treat her affair as if it were a trip to the dentist. Connie, yearning for an emotional closeness which she has never experienced before, soon becomes involved with Mellors, the estate's gamekeeper. Crude and anti-social, Mellors has an honesty and lack of pretension which Connie finds refreshing.

Throughout the novel, Lawrence creates finely drawn characters whose interactions and gradual changes are explored microscopically. The growth of love between Connie and Mellors is complicated by the increasing self-centeredness of Clifford, whose outrage at rumors of their affair is motivated by Connie's choice of someone so far beneath her. To Clifford, the separation of the social classes is an integral and inevitable part of life.Read more ›

I did not read this book until ten years ago - age forty for those who count - and found it a brilliant work. It touched on every aspect of life in that era, using a difficult premise at the focus.One reviewer called it 'sexist.' In that era, women were kept removed from the world, so men were the ones who made the initial contacts with reality and their sexuality. If Lawrence had written about that society in any other way, he would have been inaccurate. Lawrence shows the social conflict with both subtlety and brutality. Yet, Mellor IS a lover. There are sexual descriptions which are explicit, but within the coccoon of emotional bondings.The way that Lawrence has essayed the class structure of England in that era is brave and accurate in all ways. He makes the posturing of the aristocracy both frivilous and full of assinine criteria at the same time he understands the willingness of those in power to offer their lives in the defense of the general welfare.Lawrence notes again with unpleasant accuracy the detriments of an unchecked Industrial Revolution on the social structure of the time. He has Constance both witness these effects and suffer the olfactory damage.This is a literary work which has an effect across the full spectrum of the possible. Finely drawn characters searching for a better way to survive their lives in a scenario that is rife with obstacles and unpleasantness. He has the touch of the finest artist working with the lightest gossamer and the blunt force of an ogre swinging a stone axe.This was published in an abridged version because it was felt that the societal message it conveyed should be allowed to transit the draconian (by the less filtered standards of today) censorship of the era which DID focus on the sexual descriptions but could NOT stop the voice of social criticism any more than the same group could stop Dickens a few decades earlier.

I was first introduced to D.H. Lawrence in a Brit Lit class when I was in college. We read SONS AND LOVERS, and I was totally blown away by Lawrence's verdant prose and by the novel's brutal, uncomfortable beauty. My professor mentioned LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER frequently while we were studying Lawrence, and since then I've wanted to read this later, more well-known, more controversial work. Finally, two years after that class, I got around to it.

LADY CHATTERLEY'S LOVER tells the story of a young woman named Constance Reid, who marries Sir Clifford Chatterley when he's home on leave for a month from the battlefields of World War I. After a month of honeymooning, Clifford must return to the war; and sadly, when he returns six months later, he comes home "more or less in bits," paralyzed from the waist down. The newlyweds settle at Clifford's family home, Wragby, near the industrialized town of Tevershall.

Although Clifford cannot please Constance sexually, he and his wife are intellectually connected; they make love with words, and at first this is enough for Constance. However, a brief affair with one of Clifford's colleagues makes Connie aware of her more carnal needs, of her desire for physical pleasure.

Enter Oliver Mellors, the Chatterleys' groundskeeper who lives a life of solitude in a secluded wooded cabin. In Mellors, Connie is awakened to a higher consciousness, to the power of sexual pleasure and mutual satisfaction. Her relationship with Mellors helps her emerge from her cocoon of prudishness to become a highly sexualized being. The affair continues under Clifford's nose, and he is either too inattentive to notice or just pretends not to.

As a baronet, Clifford is in a position of power, but he finds himself completely powerless.Read more ›